Transcript

(Recording of a Saw-whet Owl)

In the somewhat enlightened age of the nineteen eighties, native
American birds are all protected by law. Only certain game species can
be hunted at all, and this hunting is carefully regulated. No
songbirds, including jays, crows, and ravens, and no hawks and owls, can
be legally taken without a special permit issued only for justifiable
reasons by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But it wasn’t always like this. As I’ve been reading some old bird
books lately, I’ve been jarred by how different today is from the 1700’s
and 1800’s, and even the early twentieth century. Arthur Cleveland Bent
wrote in 1938 in his Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey,
about the Saw-whet Owl: “I shall never forget the thrill I experienced
when I first met this lovely little owl. It was in my boyhood days, and
I was returning home just as darkness was coming on. As I was leaving
the woods, a small, shadowy form flitted out ahead of me and alighted on
a small tree within easy gunshot; it flew like a woodcock, but I knew
that woodcocks do not perch in trees. I was puzzled, so I put in a
light charge and shot it. I was surprised and delighted when I picked
it up and admired its exquisite, soft plumage and its big, yellow eyes.
I had never seen so small an owl, or one so beautiful. After some
research in the public library, I learned its identity, and eventually
had it mounted by a boy friend who knew how to ‘stuff’ birds. Many
years passed before I ever saw another.”

Around 1900, one ornithologist wrote about a hawk-owl: “It showed
but little fear, and could easily be approached within gun-shot. When
shot at and missed, it would take a short flight and return to its
former perch. On one occasion, Mr. Dresser, firing at one with a rifle,
cut the branch close under the bird, which returned almost immediately
to another branch, was a second time missed, and finally fell under a
third shot.”

John James Audubon, whose passion for American birds sparked a
conservation movement unmatched in the history of the country, was
himself an inveterate bird killer. He studied living birds to learn as
much as he could about their lives and to sketch them in their natural
posture, but used dead birds to paint plumage details. He ate many of
these–he wrote that flickers tasted disagreeably of the ants they fed
upon; herring gulls were excessively salty; brants were “excellent
food,” and starlings were delicate eating. Off Jacksonville Florida in
the winter of 1832, after five days of boredom, he joined his shipmates
in two “frolics,” in which they killed five bald eagles within twenty-
four hours. He wrote his wife that that was “more than most sportmen
can boast of.” He once claimed that it was a poor day’s hunting when he
shot fewer than a hundred birds. Audubon shot more than his share of
Passenger Pigeons, Carolina Parakeets, and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,
contributing to their eventual extinctions. But people inspired by his
artistry began rallying to the protection of birds in the late 1800’s;
now the name “Audubon” is equated with bird protection. And all the
collecting of earlier days, when birds’ wild habitats were still undamaged,
did far less harm than the illegal poaching that still goes on in 1987.